and, he left W with a SURPLUS. How can the rewrite this fact? THEY CAN'T. Hell, if it were possible, I'd bring Bill back!

but it's likely the Blue Dogs would have joined with Republicans in ramming it through over his veto.

Still, it should have been fought on some level.

Republicans love to pretend that the country went directly from Clinton to Obama, haven't you noticed?

The Great Deregulator

Posted on Sep 10, 2012
By Robert Scheer

Bill Clinton bears as much responsibility as any politician for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the wild applause for his disingenuous speech at the Democratic National Convention last week is a sure sign of the poverty of what passes for progressive politics.

Do those convention delegates, and the fawning media that were wowed by the former president’s rhetorical seductions, not recall that just before he left office Clinton signed off on the game-changing legislation that ended the sensible rules imposed on Wall Street during the Great Depression? It was Clinton who cooperated with the Republicans in reversing the legacy of FDR’s New Deal, opening the floodgates of unfettered avarice that almost drowned the world’s economy during the reign of George W. Bush.

How convenient to ignore the Financial Services Modernization Act, which Clinton signed into law to summarily end the Glass-Steagall barrier against the commingling of investment and commercial banking. Do the Democrats not remember that Citigroup, the first too-big-to-fail bank made legal by the law Clinton signed, became the $15 million employer of Robert Rubin, the Clinton treasury secretary who led the fight for the law that legalized the creation of Citigroup? Or that Citigroup—led by Sanford Weill, to whom Clinton gave one of the souvenir pens he used to approve that onerous legislation—went on to be a major player in the subprime mortgage swindles and had to be bailed out with more than $50 billion of taxpayer funds?

Those scams were based on bundling suspect mortgages into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), backed by the phony insurance of credit default swaps (CDSs), all of which were given “legal certainty,” to quote Lawrence Summers, who replaced Rubin as Clinton’s treasury secretary. It was Summers who encouraged Clinton to sign the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which declared CDOs and CDSs immune to any existing regulatory law and the purview of any regulatory agency.

Timothy Geithner, a protégé of Rubin and

(snip)
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_great_deregulator_20120910/

Citigroup. Bair wanted Citi resolved. However, she was not in a good position to do so, since the OCC was Citi’s primary regulator and it, along with the Treasury and Fed, were adamantly opposed. The FDIC regulated only the depositary, which was about $1 trillion of the then roughly $2 trillion bank. That meant it had data only on that operation, since the Treasury and OCC, which had better data, refused to share it. And she stressed that that the information she had was not very good thanks to Citi’s lousy information systems. She could have forced a resolution through a seldom-used mechanism (used only 6 times in the FDIC’s history) but it would have been extremely aggressive to do so, and she felt she could justify it given her incomplete vantage. She pushed hard for a fallback of firing incumbent management and the board and using a good bank/bad bank structure, which would have had shareholders and bondholders take losses. She said that she never got any analysis from her opponents as to why these measures could not be taken, but instead was met with assertions that Citi was systemically important and that if the authorities took it down, its failure would be blamed on them (an argument Bair didn’t buy either: “This was management’s failure. We didn’t tell them to set up SIVs or buy CDOs.”).

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/sheila-bair-visits-occupy-wall-street.html

Geithner promptly ignored him and slow walked it to death.

When Obama asked at an economic advisors meeting a couple of months later (that Geithner didn't attend) how the plan was coming along to break up Citi, Christina Romer said, "Mr. President, there is no plan." Obama screamed, "Well, there had better be!"

After the meeting Rahm Emmanuel chewed Romer a new asshole for attacking poor little Timmeh, without him being there to defend himself.

End of story. Never mentioned again.

Here[link:.|

Clinton was wrong, but he didn't borrow the money, throw underwriting out the window, sell fraudulent securities for fees that would be collected when they loans, which they knew were bad, went belly up. He didn't borrow against air, he didn't set black and white people down with the same credit rating and job and charge the black people more, he didn't shop the securities to the rating agencies until they obtained a fraudulent rating...

He passed a law, but he didn't rob the bank, he didn't bring tragedy to millions of people, and he didn't teach kids that their parents are too gutless to put criminals in jail (That last one is ours, by the way).

long been hijacked, democracy for sale, bought & paid for, no longer a gov't for the people & by the people.
That's the one certainty, and endless dilemma.

My insane hope is that Obama will truly channel FDR come this 2nd term, or all hell's going to break loose.
We get there at the get go with R & R, seems more likely we will take the slow road, and with it - a possibility to turn this train wreck around. OR the house of cards falls, which may happen anyway, esp. with another filibuster whoring Congress.

Where's the truth of what GW/Cheney did to this country, starting with 9/11 & on and on, the war crimes beginning with their lies to get us there, etc.,...somebody cue the MSM whores. Today, you can watch them all solemnly "remember", taking a bit of a break from their more routine assinine gossip & scripted "news".

History has routinely been "surreal", filled with lies & revisions...I'm thankful for Bill's truths & the arithmetic he brought to the DNC...somebody has to help the masses understand, it's a beginning. We are constantly barraged with propaganda, just turn on your TV for more of the surreal.

Thankfully, I don't read IBD, nor do I intend to.